My boyfriend and I love to decorate our house for the holidays. We’ve had our Christmas tree up since before we went to visit my parents for the Thanksgiving. This year, Peter got an old train set from his grandmother that his grandfather used to set up every year. Now it has a home under our tree. We moved our tinsel to our shelves to make room for a new stranded seashell garland we bought on our vacation this year. We make sure our wrapping paper matches. We go all out.
This year, I learned how to make pom poms and realized they would be the perfect addition to our warm, cozy, and adorable Christmas decor. And, darlings, making a DIY pom pom garland is easy as pie. Actually, it’s easier—there’s no flour involved and you can make this from the comfort of your own couch while you binge watch Netflix.
Full disclosure: you can totally buy a tool that makes pom poms for you, but I am too cheap for that.
What you’ll need:
- 2 balls of yarn in the color(s) of your choice
- 1 pair of sharp scissors (trust me, you’ll appreciate the sharpness)
- fishing wire
- needle
- large fork
The following photos are going to show you how to make a small pom pom with a fork. I used one of my bigger serving forks—a standard dinner fork will give you a smaller, tighter pom pom. This is a matter of taste. I made the bigger pom poms in the garland by wrapping the yarn around my fingers. Using only your fingers takes a little more practice because you don’t have both hands free to work on wrapping and tying off the yarn.
Insert the yarn down the center of the fork.
Wrap the yarn around the fork until it’s nice and bulky. Don’t be stingy. The more yarn you use, the fluffier the pom pom will be. They look their best when they’re nice and full. I made a lot of pom poms to perfect my technique, and the best ones were always the ones with the most yarn. To keep your pom poms uniform, keep a rough count of how many times you wrap the yarn around the fork. I found between 50 and 75 wraps to be good for a small to medium pom pom while about 125 wraps were perfect for the large ones (wrapping around four of my fingers).
Cut your yarn and cut another piece of yarn from your ball that’s a few inches long.
Take your separate piece of yarn and thread it through the center tines so it is coming up from behind the wrapped yarn at both the top and bottom.
Tie in a loose knot so you can slide the wound yarn off your fork. When it’s off the yarn tie the yarn off very tightly. Your wound yarn should curl into a circle. This is really important—a lot of the tutorials I read online did not highlight this part and it makes for noticeably better pom poms when you tie this strand nice and tight.
With your very sharp scissors, cut through all of the loops made from winding the yarn around the fork.
You’ll end up with a weird lop-sided ball of yarn. Unless you’re really good at cutting or have really small scissors. It is theoretically possible to do this perfectly, but the rest of us will need to do some trimming.
Fluff your pom pom and trim the edges until it’s as uniform as you’d like. This is where you’ll notice if you didn’t use enough yarn—a floppy pom pom that doesn’t hold it’s shape could have used more wraps in the initial fork stage.
Now make a whole bunch of pom poms in whatever size and color combinations you’d like. I used red and green in three different sizes for a variegated effect in the final garland.
Thread your fishing line through a needle being sure to knot off securely. Thread a pom pom and make another knot as close to the pom pom as you can get. This will help keep them in place while they’re hung. Evenly space your pom poms down the length of your fishing wire.
Then enjoy your holiday cheer, darlings.
